What it takes to have a best-seller

Check out agent Nephele Tempest's comments on how best-sellers are made (luck and timing being strong components).

A Client's SALE

Music I'm listening to: White Lines by Grandmaster Flash

::doing the Happy Inky Writer's Dance::

One of my clients (and they're such wonderful people, every last one of 'em!) just accepted a five-figure deal for a memoir, sold on proposal. And she got the news while taking a vacation in lovely Ireland. How's that for a fun sales story?

More details to come sometime down the road, after the contract is signed. :)

Sometimes life bites, and sometimes...there are kittens

Music: Inspiral Carpets - Two Worlds Collide

Life squashed us a bit flat over the last couple of weeks. Some of you will remember that a year ago on Labor Day weekend, we lost one of our beloved kitties to cancer. Well, this year another followed suit--we don't know that it was cancer (two different vets weren't sure of what caused the illness), but I have my suspicions. At any rate, my baby boy (he was fifteen, but still my baby) is now waiting for us at the Rainbow Bridge.

A few days later, we found out that another of our kitties may soon join him, due to a downward spiral of his bad kidneys and complications in the rest of his body.

To celebrate the lives of our furry loved ones, we went to the local animal shelter to adopt a kitten, or two. (Normally we would have adopted an adult--there were so many wonderful ones there, and they need homes just as much as kittens--but we considered our "kidney cat" and felt kittens would lessen his stress and objections to interlopers on his established territory.)

We didn't just come home with one or two kittens, but three.

What could I do? When I raised my logical objections to adding three littermates to our home (the extra food, litter, and VET BILLS, which were already outrageous this month), my husband made the best argument ever: "Okay, which of these kittens will you leave here at the shelter?"

Ouch.

So yep, all three snuggled together in their new carrier on the way home. And I wouldn't trade 'em for the world. They're even providing our kidney cat with some entertainment.

So YAY for kittens!